Music Chronicle

Hudson Review, The, Spring 2004 by Dhuga, U S

The most memorable concert of autumn was, to my mind, that of the Kirov Orchestra on Friday, 3 October-an all Shostakovich program. I doubt whether the stage of Carnegie Hall has ever been so full. The magnificent Valery Gergiev led his massive orchestra first through Shostakovich's (rarely performed) "From Jewish Folk Poetry," Op. 79a (1948), a heartbreaking song cycle which the great aforementioned pianist Richter, in a 1979 journal entry, deemed "among the most sublime and inspired works written this century." The work is dark and haunting: witness such song titles as Flach ob umershem mladence ("The Lament for the Dead Child"); ßroshennyj olec ("The Abandoned Father"); Pesnja o nuzdhe ("The Song of Misery"). Even the eleventh and last song of the cycle, Schast'je-"Happiness"-was anything but happy. Tenor Yevgeny Akimov shone, evincing a remarkable ability to rise even above the orchestra's most forceful surges. And there was Gergiev, delivering a powerful swipe with the back of his hand across his sweating brow, as operatically and operativdy dramatic as his conducting. His body is so expressive that he apparently cannot be restrained to a rostrum-and-rail, nor use a wand: he stands on level with his players, moving them with his own lively frame and tireless arms. One was reminded of Yeats's famous lines, "O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, / How can we know the dancer from the dance?"

After the intermission we were treated to a performance of the grand Seventh Symphony in C major, Op. 64, "Leningrad" (1941). I doubt whether I shall ever again hear the Seventh Symphony performed as powerfully as it was that night. Following the intermission there was hardly pause enough to take one's seat: Gergiev lunged forward into the allegretto, his hands caressing the strings as if consoling an infant. I have never quite understood concertgoers who close their eyes-not in order to sleep, which is, alas, sometimes warranted-but in order to "appreciate fully" or to "absorb" the music or some such nonsense. The shut-eyed listener will have missed much in the second movement, the moderato-in which a triumphant drumbeat is faintly introduced in the distance-with Gergiev standing ramrod as a disciplined Soviet officer on guard, bringing out a stately theme from his followers in turn. Never have I heard an orchestra so marvellously and justifiably loud. In August 1942, Shostakovich and his emaciated symphony players were precariously flown into blockaded Leningrad, the city having been encircled by German soldiers. Legend has it that the concert-transmitted throughout the bombarded city via loudspeakers-was so loud as not only to lift the spirits of the citizenry, but to lower those of the enemy. Thus the Seventh Symphony, particularly its finale (the "Victory," allegro non troppo), was popularly-and, of course, officially-recognized as the prelude to actual victory over the Germans three years after the storied performance. That evening at Carnegie Hall, listening to the marching drumbeat's gradual rising and the cymbal's crashing, one could not but believe the legend.